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Yet there must be a little difference between us somewhere, or why does Abijah Flagg write Latin letters to Emma Jane, instead of to me? There is one example on the other side of the argument,—Abijah Flagg. He stands out from all the rest of the boys like the Rock of Gibraltar in the geography pictures. Is it because he never went to school until he was sixteen? He almost died of longing to go, and the longing seemed to teach him more than going. He knew his letters, and could read simple things, but it was I who taught him what books really meant when I was eleven and he thirteen. We studied while he was husking corn or cutting potatoes for seed, or shelling beans in the Squire’s barn. His beloved Emma Jane didn’t teach him; her father wold not have let her be friends with a chore-boy! It was I who found him after milking-time, summer nights, suffering, yes dying, of Least Common Multiple and Greatest Common Divisor; I who struck the shackles from the slave and told him to skip it all and go on to something easier, like Fractions, Percentage, and Compound Interest, as I did myself. Oh! How he used to smell of the cows when I was correcting his sums on warm evenings, but I don’t regret it, for he is now the joy of Limerick and the pride of Riverboro, and I suppose has forgotten the proper side on which to approach a cow if you wish to milk her. This now unserviceable knowledge is neatly inclosed in the outgrown shell he threw off two or three years ago. His gratitude to me knows no bounds, but—he writes Latin letters to Emma Jane! But as Mr. Perkins said about drowning the kittens (I now quote from myself at thirteen), “It is the way of the world and how things have to be!”

Well, I have read the Thought Book all through, and when I want to make Mr. Aladdin laugh, I shall show him my composition on the relative values of punishment and reward as builders of character.

I am not at all the same Rebecca today at sixteen that I was then, at twelve and thirteen. I hope, in getting rid of my failings, that I haven’t scrubbed and rubbed so hard that I have taken the gloss off the poor little virtues that lay just alongside of the faults; for as I read the foolish doggerel and the funny, funny “Remerniscences,” I see on the whole a nice, well-meaning, trusting, loving heedless little creature, that after all I’d rather build on than outgrow altogether, because she is Me; the Me that was made and born just a little different from all the rest of the babies in my birthday year.

One thing is alike in the child and the girl. They both love to set thoughts down in black and white; to see how they look, how they sound, and how they make one feel when one reads them over.

They both love the sound of beautiful sentences and the tinkle of rhyming words, and in fact, of the three great R’s of life, they adore Reading and Riting, as much as they abhor ‘Rithmetic.

The little girl in the old book is always thinking of what she is “going to be.”

Uncle Jerry Cobb spoiled me a good deal in this direction. I remember he said to everybody when I wrote my verses for the flag-raising: “Nary rung on the ladder o’ fame but that child’ll climb if you give her time!”—poor Uncle Jerry! He will be so disappointed in me as time goes on. And still he would think I have already climbed two rungs on the ladder, although it is only a little Wareham ladder, for I am one of the “Pilot” editors, the first “girl editor”—and I have taken a fifty dollar prize in composition and paid off the interest on a twelve hundred dollar mortgage with it.

 
“High is the rank we now possess,
But higher we shall rise;
Though what we shall hereafter be
Is hid from mortal eyes.”
 

This hymn was sung in meeting the Sunday after my election, and Mr. Aladdin was there that day and looked across the aisle and smiled at me. Then he sent me a sheet of paper from Boston the next morning with just one verse in the middle of it.

“She made the cleverest people quite ashamed; And ev’n the good with inward envy groan, Finding themselves so very much exceeded, In their own way by all the things that she did.”

Miss Maxwell says it is Byron, and I wish I had thought of the last rhyme before Byron did; my rhymes are always so common.

I am too busy doing, nowadays, to give very much thought to being. Mr. Aladdin was teasing me one day about what he calls my “cast-off careers.”

“What makes you aim at any mark in particular, Rebecca?” he asked, looking at Miss Maxwell and laughing. “Women never hit what they aim at, anyway; but if they shut their eyes and shoot in the air they generally find themselves in the bull’s eye.”

I think one reason that I have always dreamed of what I should be, when I grew up, was, that even before father died mother worried about the mortgage on the farm, and what would become of us if it were foreclosed.

It was hard on children to be brought up on a mortgage that way, but oh! it was harder still on poor dear mother, who had seven of us then to think of, and still has three at home to feed and clothe out of the farm.

Aunt Jane says I am young for my age, Aunt Miranda is afraid that I will never really “grow up,” Mr. Aladdin says that I don’t know the world any better than the pearl inside of the oyster. They none of them know the old, old thoughts I have, some of them going back years and years; for they are never ones that I can speak about.

I remember how we children used to admire father, he was so handsome and graceful and amusing, never cross like mother, or too busy to play with us. He never did any work at home because he had to keep his hands nice for playing the church melodeon, or the violin or piano for dances.

Mother used to say: “Hannah and Rebecca, you must hull the strawberries, your father cannot help.” “John, you must milk next year for I haven’t the time and it would spoil your father’s hands.”

All the other men in Temperance village wore calico, or flannel shirts, except on Sundays, but Father never wore any but white ones with starched bosoms. He was very particular about them and mother used to stitch and stitch on the pleats, and press and press the bosoms and collar and cuffs, sometimes late at night.

Then she was tired and thin and gray, with no time to sew on new dresses for herself, and no time to wear them, because she was always taking care of the babies; and father was happy and well and handsome. But we children never thought much about it until once, after father had mortgaged the farm, there was going to be a sociable in Temperance village. Mother could not go as Jenny had whooping-cough and Mark had just broken his arm, and when she was tying father’s necktie, the last thing before he started, he said: “I wish, Aurelia, that you cared a little about YOUR appearance and YOUR dress; it goes a long way with a man like me.”

Mother had finished the tie, and her hands dropped suddenly. I looked at her eyes and mouth while she looked at father and in a minute I was ever so old, with a grown-up ache in my heart. It has always stayed there, although I admired my handsome father and was proud of him because he was so talented; but now that I am older and have thought about things, my love for mother is different from what it used to be. Father was always the favorite when we were little, he was so interesting, and I wonder sometimes if we don’t remember interesting people longer and better than we do those who are just good and patient. If so it seems very cruel.

As I look back I see that Miss Ross, the artist who brought me my pink parasol from Paris, sowed the first seeds in me of ambition to do something special. Her life seemed so beautiful and so easy to a child. I had not been to school then, or read George Macdonald, so I did not know that “Ease is the lovely result of forgotten toil.”

Miss Ross sat out of doors and painted lovely things, and everybody said how wonderful they were, and bought them straight away; and she took care of a blind father and two brothers, and traveled wherever she wished. It comes back to me now, that summer when I was ten and Miss Ross painted me sitting by the mill-wheel while she talked to me of foreign countries!

The other day Miss Maxwell read something from Browning’s poems to the girls of her literature class. It was about David the shepherd boy who used to lie in his hollow watching one eagle “wheeling slow as in sleep.” He used to wonder about the wide world that the eagle beheld, the eagle that was stretching his wings so far up in the blue, while he, the poor shepherd boy, could see only the “strip twixt the hill and the sky;” for he lay in a hollow.

I told Mr. Baxter about it the next day, which was the Saturday before I joined the church. I asked him if it was wicked to long to see as much as the eagle saw?

There was never anybody quite like Mr. Baxter. “Rebecca dear,” he said, “it may be that you need not always lie in a hollow, as the shepherd boy did; but wherever you lie, that little strip you see ‘twixt the hill and the sky’ is able to hold all of earth and all of heaven, if only you have the right sort of vision.”

I was a long, long time about “experiencing religion.” I remember Sunday afternoons at the brick house the first winter after I went there; when I used to sit in the middle of the dining-room as I was bid, silent and still, with the big family Bible on my knees. Aunt Miranda had Baxter’s “Saints’ Rest,” but her seat was by the window, and she at least could give a glance into the street now and then without being positively wicked.

Aunt Jane used to read the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” The fire burned low; the tall clock ticked, ticked, so slowly and steadily, that the pictures swam before my eyes and I almost fell asleep.

They thought by shutting everything else out that I should see God; but I didn’t, not once. I was so homesick for Sunnybook and John that I could hardly learn my weekly hymns, especially the sad, long one beginning:

 
“My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead.”
 

It was brother John for whom I was chiefly homesick on Sunday afternoons, because at Sunnybrook Farm father was dead and mother was always busy, and Hannah never liked to talk.

Then the next year the missionaries from Syria came to Riverboro; and at the meeting Mr. Burch saw me playing the melodeon, and thought I was grown up and a church member, and so he asked me to lead in prayer.

I didn’t dare to refuse, and when I prayed, which was just like thinking out loud, I found I could talk to God a great deal easier than to Aunt Miranda or even to Uncle Jerry Cobb. There were things I could say to Him that I could never say to anybody else, and saying them always made me happy and contented.

When Mr. Baxter asked me last year about joining the church, I told him I was afraid I did not understand God quite well enough to be a real member.

“So you don’t quite understand God, Rebecca?” he asked, smiling. “Well, there is something else much more important, which is, that He understands you! He understands your feeble love, your longings, desires, hopes, faults, ambitions, crosses; and that, after all, is what counts! Of course you don’t understand Him! You are overshadowed by His love, His power, His benignity, His wisdom; that is as it should be! Why, Rebecca, dear, if you could stand erect and unabashed in God’s presence, as one who perfectly comprehended His nature or His purposes, it would be sacrilege! Don’t be puzzled out of your blessed inheritance of faith, my child; accept God easily and naturally, just as He accepts you!”

“God never puzzled me, Mr. Baxter; it isn’t that,” I said; “but the doctrines do worry me dreadfully.”

“Let them alone for the present,” Mr Baxter said. “Anyway, Rebecca, you can never prove God; you can only find Him!”

“Then do you think I have really experienced religion, Mr. Baxter?” I asked. “Am I the beginnings of a Christian?”

“You are a dear child of the understanding God!” Mr. Baxter said; “and I say it over to myself night and morning so that I can never forget it.”

The year is nearly over and the next few months will be lived in the rush and whirlwind of work that comes before graduation. The bell for philosophy class will ring in ten minutes, and as I have been writing for nearly two hours, I must learn my lesson going up the Academy hill. It will not be the first time; it is a grand hill for learning! I suppose after fifty years or so the very ground has become soaked with knowledge, and every particle of air in the vicinity is crammed with useful information.

I will put my book into my trunk (having no blessed haymow hereabouts) and take it out again,—when shall I take it out again?

After graduation perhaps I shall be too grown up and too busy to write in a Thought Book; but oh, if only something would happen worth putting down; something strange; something unusual; something different from the things that happen every day in Riverboro and Edgewood!

Graduation will surely take me a little out of “the hollow,”—make me a little more like the soaring eagle, gazing at the whole wide world beneath him while he wheels “slow as in sleep.” But whether or not, I’ll try not to be a discontented shepherd, but remember what Mr. Baxter said, that the little strip that I see “twixt the hill and the sky” is able to hold all of earth and all of heaven, if only I have the eyes to see it.

Rebecca Rowena Randall.

Wareham Female Seminary, December 187—.

Eleventh Chronicle. ABIJAH THE BRAVE AND THE FAIR EMMAJANE

I

 
“A warrior so bold and a maiden so bright
Conversed as they sat on the green.
They gazed at each other in tender delight.
Alonzo the brave was the name of the knight,
And the maid was the fair Imogene.
 
 
“Alas!’ said the youth, ‘since tomorrow I go
To fight in a far distant land,
Your tears for my absence soon ceasing to flow,
Some other will court you, and you will bestow
On a wealthier suitor your hand.’
 
 
‘Oh, hush these suspicions!’ Fair Imogene said,
“So hurtful to love and to me!
For if you be living, or if you be dead,
I swear by the Virgin that none in your stead
Shall the husband of Imogene be!’
 

Ever since she was eight years old Rebecca had wished to be eighteen, but now that she was within a month of that awe-inspiring and long-desired age she wondered if, after all, it was destined to be a turning point in her quiet existence. Her eleventh year, for instance, had been a real turning-point, since it was then that she had left Sunnybrook Farm and come to her maiden aunts in Riverboro. Aurelia Randall may have been doubtful as to the effect upon her spinster sisters of the irrepressible child, but she was hopeful from the first that the larger opportunities of Riverboro would be the “making” of Rebecca herself.

The next turning-point was her fourteenth year, when she left the district school for the Wareham Female Seminary, then in the hey-day of its local fame. Graduation (next to marriage, perhaps, the most thrilling episode in the life of a little country girl) happened at seventeen, and not long afterward her Aunt Miranda’s death, sudden and unexpected, changed not only all the outward activities and conditions of her life, but played its own part in her development.

The brick house looked very homelike and pleasant on a June morning nowadays with children’s faces smiling at the windows and youthful footsteps sounding through the halls; and the brass knocker on the red-painted front door might have remembered Rebecca’s prayer of a year before, when she leaned against its sun-warmed brightness and whispered: “God bless Aunt Miranda; God bless the brick house that was; God bless the brick house that’s going to be!”

All the doors and blinds were open to the sun and air as they had never been in Miss Miranda Sawyer’s time. The hollyhock bed that had been her chief pride was never neglected, and Rebecca liked to hear the neighbors say that there was no such row of beautiful plants and no such variety of beautiful colors in Riverboro as those that climbed up and peeped in at the kitchen windows where old Miss Miranda used to sit.

Now that the place was her very own Rebecca felt a passion of pride in its smoothly mown fields, its carefully thinned-out woods, its blooming garden spots, and its well-weeded vegetable patch; felt, too whenever she looked at any part of it, a passion of gratitude to the stern old aunt who had looked upon her as the future head of the family, as well as a passion of desire to be worthy of that trust.

It had been a very difficult year for a girl fresh from school: the death of her aunt, the nursing of Miss Jane, prematurely enfeebled by the shock, the removal of her own invalid mother and the rest of the little family from Sunnybrook Farm. But all had gone smoothly; and when once the Randall fortunes had taken an upward turn nothing seemed able to stop their intrepid ascent.

Aurelia Randall renewed her youth in the companionship of her sister Jane and the comforts by which her children were surrounded; the mortgage was no longer a daily terror, for Sunnybrook had been sold to the new railroad; Hannah, now Mrs. Will Melville, was happily situated; John, at last, was studying medicine; Mark, the boisterous and unlucky brother, had broken no bones for several months; while Jenny and Fanny were doing well at the district school under Miss Libby Moses, Miss Dearborn’s successor.

“I don’t feel very safe,” thought Rebecca, remembering all these unaccustomed mercies as she sat on the front doorsteps, with her tatting shuttle flying in and out of the fine cotton like a hummingbird. “It’s just like one of those too beautiful July days that winds up with a thundershower before night! Still, when you remember that the Randalls never had anything but thunder and lightning, rain, snow, and hail, in their family history for twelve or fifteen years, perhaps it is only natural that they should enjoy a little spell of settled weather. If it really turns out to BE settled, now that Aunt Jane and mother are strong again I must be looking up one of what Mr. Aladdin calls my cast-off careers.”—“There comes Emma Jane Perkins through her front gate; she will be here in a minute, and I’ll tease her!” and Rebecca ran in the door and seated herself at the old piano that stood between the open windows in the parlor.

Peeping from behind the muslin curtains, she waited until Emma Jane was on the very threshold and then began singing her version of an old ballad, made that morning while she was dressing. The ballad was a great favorite of hers, and she counted on doing telling execution with it in the present instance by the simple subterfuge of removing the original hero and heroine, Alonzo and Imogene, and substituting Abijah the Brave and the Fair Emmajane, leaving the circumstances in the first three verses unaltered, because in truth they seemed to require no alteration.

Her high, clear voice, quivering with merriment, floated through the windows into the still summer air:

 
“‘A warrior so bold and a maiden so bright
Conversed as they sat on the green.
They gazed at each other in tender delight.
Abijah the Brave was the name of the knight,
And the maid was the Fair Emmajane.’”
 

“Rebecca Randall, stop! Somebody’ll hear you!”

“No, they won’t—they’re making jelly in the kitchen, miles away.”

 
“‘Alas!’ said the youth, since tomorrow I go
To fight in a far distant land,
Your tears for my absence soon ceasing to flow,
Some other will court you, and you will bestow
On a wealthier suitor your hand.’”
 

“Rebecca, you can’t THINK how your voice carries! I believe mother can hear it over to my house!”

“Then, if she can, I must sing the third verse, just to clear your reputation from the cloud cast upon it in the second,” laughed her tormentor, going on with the song:

“‘Oh, hush these suspicions!’ Fair Emmajane said, ‘So hurtful to love and to me! For if you be living, or if you be dead, I swear, my Abijah, that none in your stead, Shall the husband of Emmajane be!’”

After ending the third verse Rebecca wheeled around on the piano stool and confronted her friend, who was carefully closing the parlor windows:—

“Emma Jane Perkins, it is an ordinary Thursday afternoon at four o’clock and you have on your new blue barege, although there is not even a church sociable in prospect this evening. What does this mean? Is Abijah the Brave coming at last?”

“I don’t know certainly, but it will be some time this week.”

“And of course you’d rather be dressed up and not seen, than seen when not dressed up. Right, my Fair Emmajane; so would I. Not that it makes any difference to poor me, wearing my fourth best black and white calico and expecting nobody.

“Oh, well, YOU! There’s something inside of you that does instead of pretty dresses,” cried Emma Jane, whose adoration of her friend had never altered nor lessened since they met at the age of eleven. “You know you are as different from anybody else in Riverboro as a princess in a fairy story. Libby Moses says they would notice you in Lowell, Massachusetts!”

“Would they? I wonder,” speculated Rebecca, rendered almost speechless by this tribute to her charms. “Well, if Lowell, Massachusetts, could see me, or if you could see me, in my new lavender muslin with the violet sash, it would die of envy, and so would you!”

“If I had been going to be envious of you, Rebecca, I should have died years ago. Come, let’s go out on the steps where it’s shady and cool.”

“And where we can see the Perkins front gate and the road running both ways,” teased Rebecca, and then, softening her tone, she said: “How is it getting on, Emmy? Tell me what’s happened since I’ve been in Brunswick.”

“Nothing much,” confessed Emma Jane. “He writes to me, but I don’t write to him, you know. I don’t dare to, till he comes to the house.”

“Are his letters still in Latin?” asked Rebecca, with a twinkling eye.

“Oh, no! Not now, because—well, because there are things you can’t seem to write in Latin. I saw him at the Masonic picnic in the grove, but he won’t say anything REAL to me till he gets more pay and dares to speak to mother and father. He IS brave in all other ways, but I ain’t sure he’ll ever have the courage for that, he’s so afraid of them and always has been. Just remember what’s in his mind all the time, Rebecca, that my folks know all about what his mother was, and how he was born on the poor-farm. Not that I care; look how he’s educated and worked himself up! I think he’s perfectly elegant, and I shouldn’t mind if he had been born in the bulrushes, like Moses.”

Emma Jane’s every-day vocabulary was pretty much what it had been before she went to the expensive Wareham Female Seminary. She had acquired a certain amount of information concerning the art of speech, but in moments of strong feeling she lapsed into the vernacular. She grew slowly in all directions, did Emma Jane, and, to use Rebecca’s favorite nautilus figure, she had left comparatively few outgrown shells on the shores of “life’s unresting sea.”

“Moses wasn’t born in the bulrushes, Emmy dear,” corrected Rebecca laughingly. “Pharaoh’s daughter found him there. It wasn’t quite as romantic a scene—Squire Bean’s wife taking little Abijah Flagg from the poorhouse when his girl-mother died, but, oh, I think Abijah’s splendid! Mr. Ladd says Riverboro’ll be proud of him yet, and I shouldn’t wonder, Emmy dear, if you had a three-story house with a cupola on it, some day; and sitting down at your mahogany desk inlaid with garnets, you will write notes stating that Mrs. Abijah Flagg requests the pleasure of Miss Rebecca Randall’s company to tea, and that the Hon. Abijah Flagg, M.C., will call for her on his way from the station with a span of horses and the turquoise carryall!”

Emma Jane laughed at the ridiculous prophecy, and answered: “If I ever write the invitation I shan’t be addressing it to Miss Randall, I’m sure of that; it’ll be to Mrs.–”

“Don’t!” cried Rebecca impetuously, changing color and putting her hand over Emma Jane’s lips. “If you won’t I’ll stop teasing. I couldn’t bear a name put to anything, I couldn’t, Emmy dear! I wouldn’t tease you, either, if it weren’t something we’ve both known ever so long—something that you have always consulted me about of your own accord, and Abijah too.”

“Don’t get excited,” replied Emma Jane, “I was only going to say you were sure to be Mrs. Somebody in course of time.”

“Oh,” said Rebecca with a relieved sigh, her color coming back; “if that’s all you meant, just nonsense; but I thought, I thought—I don’t really know just what I thought!”

“I think you thought something you didn’t want me to think you thought,” said Emma Jane with unusual felicity.

“No, it’s not that; but somehow, today, I have been remembering things. Perhaps it was because at breakfast Aunt Jane and mother reminded me of my coming birthday and said that Squire Bean would give me the deed of the brick house. That made me feel very old and responsible; and when I came out on the steps this afternoon it was just as if pictures of the old years were moving up and down the road. Everything is so beautiful today! Doesn’t the sky look as if it had been dyed blue and the fields painted pink and green and yellow this very minute?”

“It’s a perfectly elegant day!” responded Emma Jane with a sigh. “If only my mind was at rest! That’s the difference between being young and grown-up. We never used to think and worry.”

“Indeed we didn’t! Look, Emmy, there’s the very spot where Uncle Jerry Cobb stopped the stage and I stepped out with my pink parasol and my bouquet of purple lilacs, and you were watching me from your bedroom window and wondering what I had in mother’s little hair trunk strapped on behind. Poor Aunt Miranda didn’t love me at first sight, and oh, how cross she was the first two years! But now every hard thought I ever had comes back to me and cuts like a knife!”

“She was dreadful hard to get along with, and I used to hate her like poison,” confessed Emma Jane; “but I am sorry now. She was kinder toward the last, anyway, and then, you see children know so little! We never suspected she was sick or that she was worrying over that lost interest money.”

“That’s the trouble. People seem hard and unreasonable and unjust, and we can’t help being hurt at the time, but if they die we forget everything but our own angry speeches; somehow we never remember theirs. And oh, Emma Jane, there’s another such a sweet little picture out there in the road. The next day after I came to Riverboro, do you remember, I stole out of the brick house crying, and leaned against the front gate. You pushed your little fat pink-and-white face through the pickets and said: Don’t cry! I’ll kiss you if you will me!’”

Lumps rose suddenly in Emma Jane’s throat, and she put her arm around Rebecca’s waist as they sat together side by side.

“Oh, I do remember,” she said in a choking voice. “And I can see the two of us driving over to North Riverboro and selling soap to Mr. Adam Ladd; and lighting up the premium banquet lamp at the Simpson party; and laying the daisies round Jacky Winslow’s mother when she was dead in the cabin; and trundling Jacky up and down the street in our old baby carriage!”

“And I remember you,” continued Rebecca, “being chased down the hill by Jacob Moody, when we were being Daughters of Zion and you had been chosen to convert him!”

“And I remember you, getting the flag back from Mr. Simpson; and how you looked when you spoke your verses at the flag-raising.”

“And have you forgotten the week I refused to speak to Abijah Flagg because he fished my turban with the porcupine quills out of the river when I hoped at last that I had lost it! Oh, Emma Jane, we had dear good times together in the little harbor.’”

“I always thought that was an elegant composition of yours—that farewell to the class,” said Emma Jane.

“The strong tide bears us on, out of the little harbor of childhood into the unknown seas,” recalled Rebecca. “It is bearing you almost out of my sight, Emmy, these last days, when you put on a new dress in the afternoon and look out of the window instead of coming across the street. Abijah Flagg never used to be in the little harbor with the rest of us; when did he first sail in, Emmy?”

Emma Jane grew a deeper pink and her button-hole of a mouth quivered with delicious excitement.

“It was last year at the seminary, when he wrote me his first Latin letter from Limerick Academy,” she said in a half whisper.

“I remember,” laughed Rebecca. “You suddenly began the study of the dead languages, and the Latin dictionary took the place of the crochet needle in your affections. It was cruel of you never to show me that letter, Emmy!”

“I know every word of it by heart,” said the blushing Emma Jane, “and I think I really ought to say it to you, because it’s the only way you will ever know how perfectly elegant Abijah is. Look the other way, Rebecca. Shall I have to translate it for you, do you think, because it seems to me I could not bear to do that!”

“It depends upon Abijah’s Latin and your pronunciation,” teased Rebecca. “Go on; I will turn my eyes toward the orchard.”

The Fair Emmajane, looking none too old still for the “little harbor,” but almost too young for the “unknown seas,” gathered up her courage and recited like a tremulous parrot the boyish love letter that had so fired her youthful imagination.

“Vale, carissima, carissima puella!” repeated Rebecca in her musical voice. “Oh, how beautiful it sounds! I don’t wonder it altered your feeling for Abijah! Upon my word, Emma Jane,” she cried with a sudden change of tone, “if I had suspected for an instant that Abijah the Brave had that Latin letter in him I should have tried to get him to write it to me; and then it would be I who would sit down at my mahogany desk and ask Miss Perkins to come to tea with Mrs. Flagg.”

Emma Jane paled and shuddered openly. “I speak as a church member, Rebecca,” she said, “when I tell you I’ve always thanked the Lord that you never looked at Abijah Flagg and he never looked at you. If either of you ever had, there never would have been a chance for me, and I’ve always known it!”